Shining Apples
by stellamaru
Summary: Occlumency, Pensieves, knowing better, and the inevitability of madness. SSHP, in a way. Light R.


**Shining apples,**

If Snape didn't know better, he'd think Dumbledore purposefully foisted the boy on him as some kind of prolonged punishment. "You'll take up Occlumency with Harry again this year," Dumbledore told--no, ordered--him. "I fear that I could not be as... ruthless as he requires. He needs to be able to defend against the worst." 

If Snape didn't know better, he'd think Dumbledore wanted him to empathize with the boy. This would never--could never--happen. Not with _that_ face and _those_ eyes. Not with that familiar ease on the Quidditch pitch. Not with his penchant for disobedience and mischief. Not with those eyes blinking behind _his_ damned spectacles. 

If Snape didn't know better, he'd think Dumbledore took a perverse pleasure in tormenting him. He'd given the boy a Pensieve to use and taught him the charm to remove his more sensitive thoughts. Now it sat on the desk, swirling with things the boy didn't want Snape to know about. 

It wasn't humiliation at the hands of those Muggles. Snape had caught a glimpse of the boy's fat cousin forcing a live worm down the boy's throat while his equally fat cronies laughed. 

It wasn't rule breaking with his friends. Dumbledore made it plain that Snape wasn't allowed to take points for, or even acknowledge outside their sessions, things he saw while training the boy. The boy's head was filled with misadventures under his invisibility cloak. 

It wasn't girls. A few profoundly innocent kisses with a tiny assortment of Hogwarts students were all Snape had seen. The boy blushed when those memories came up, but they were there; they weren't in his Pensieve. 

Snape would like to know-- Snape wanted to know-- Snape needed to know what the boy plucked from his mind and set in that shining basin, mere feet away from Snape's hand. Did it have something to do with why the boy seemed calmer and more confident, as though he'd grown in more than just height over the summer? The boy could almost look Snape straight in the eye now, and showed signs of getting even taller. No broader, though. The boy was as thin as ever. 

An image of him shivering in the cupboard with no dinner, contemplating the flavor of spiders, came unbidden to Snape's mind. 

"Professor? Are- are we going to start?" 

Snape blinked. "We will begin when I say we will," he said, standing. "Madam Pomfrey should have a package prepared for me. Go and fetch it." 

The boy scowled and glanced at the Pensieve on the desk. "Leave it," Snape said. 

The bowl sat squat on the desk, taunting Snape with its nearness. Was it Black's death? Did the boy wail and cry, and now felt ashamed of it? Perhaps Lupin had broken down, and the boy removed the memory of it in a misguided attempt to protect the werewolf's dignity. It would be the sort of foolish thing the boy would do. 

Snape took a step closer to the Pensieve. 

Most likely it was something terribly ordinary: wanking in the showers, or a bit of experimental groping with his Weasley right hand. 

It might be Black and Lupin. The boy had stayed at Grimmauld Place long enough to notice something amiss with those two. Black had more bravado than his godson and less sense than Longbottom; the boy probably walked in on one of their... assignations. Didn't want his nasty Potions Master to know his godfather and favorite teacher were buggering each other, hm? 

Snape bent towards the Pensieve, his waist at a perfect 45-degree angle. It could be about him. The boy had shown no qualms about spying. With his cloak, he could have sat right in Snape's office and watched him mark essays. Or do any number of things. 

His nose touched the cool, shimmering threads and he saw-- 

_pale wrists encased in black, turning and twisting as the hands, his hands, stirred a potion. The blue veins showing dark, then light, as he wrote with his quill, flicking and scratching across the parchment_

Snape pulled back and straightened his posture, frowning. The boy filled his Pensieve with... 

The door creaked and Snape turned to see the boy blunder in, his face red from running. "Mind yourself, Potter," he said, sneering. "If you dropped that, no amount of scrubbing could get your entrails off my dungeon walls." In truth, it was Pomfrey's monthly potions inventory. 

The boy set his jaw and looked like he was biting back some attempt at a cutting remark. 

"Take out your wand and we'll begin," Snape told him tersely. 

Those damned green eyes widened behind his ridiculous pair of glasses. "You didn't-- look." 

"Unlike you, some people understand the concept of restraint." 

The boy snorted, but took out his wand. His face was still slightly pink and Snape saw the vein in his throat flutter and pulse. 

If Snape didn't know better, he'd think Dumbledore was out to drive him mad. 

**pomegranates,**

_A flash of death-white skin traversed by highways of blue veins, islands of darkening love bites dotting the landscape-- Snape, examining his own body in a long mirror, like he was contemplating a particularly difficult potion._

"Damn it," the boy muttered when Snape threw him out of his mind. They'd been at the lesson for two hours, and fatigue was plain on his face. "Shouldn't we stop sometime soon, sir?" 

"Do you think _he_ will stop, just because you are tired? Perhaps if you asked him politely?" Snape narrowed his eyes. "We will stop when I say. Legilimens!" 

_Black, falling though the veil. Diggory's limp body. Fat, tormenting cousin. Clumsy kisses with the Ravenclaw Seeker. Tonks's bosom. Granger's ankle, brushing obliviously across the boy's lap. Shacklebolt's muscled arm? Ah, now this is interesting--_

"Protego!" 

Snape stumbled back, but not before a flash of himself bending over the boy's Pensieve passed between them, and there was a jarring shift: he watched the boy watching him look into the Pensieve, watching the boy watching his hands. The memory looped again and again, without changing or stopping. "Out!" Snape said, squeezing his eyes shut. 

When he opened his eyes, the boy stood in front of him, his shoulders hunched and his eyes lidded. "You did look." 

"And if I did?" Snape said, his lip curling. 

The boy was quiet for a minute. "It doesn't matter," he finally said, brushing the sweat off his forehead and turning to go. 

Five minutes passed before Snape noticed the boy's full Pensieve, abandoned on his desk. 

_there... the first memory, his hands writing, his wrists moving. Then-- _

--another. Grimmauld Place, summer. Snape, at a writing desk, making out his report. Face flushed, heart thrumming, exhausted from keeping up the facade of loyalty in the Dark Lord's presence. The boy in his cloak watching from the corner, trying to control his breathing. Slowly, his eyes begin to watch Snape's long hands, the tips blackened from ink and potions. 

He focuses on Snape's hard, knobby wrist bone and the veined underside, moving rapidly across the parchment, pausing only to dip more ink. 

When he leaves (his report finished), the boy releases a breath, kneels, grasps roughly at his erection, and vomits, all in quick succession. 

Well. 

Snape tapped his lip with his index finger, a cold smile threatening to cross his mouth. He picked up his wand and concentrated on the image the boy had lingered on earlier--himself, in the mirror--and deposited his own silvery thread in with the boy's. 

If he was to be driven mad, he was not going alone. 

**and cool water.**

Madness, planned or not, was inevitable, the moment Snape agreed (if you could call it that) to take Potter back on. The incredible folly of mixing his memories in with the boy's was evidence enough. There were _laws_ against such things. 

Gazing into another person's Pensieve was one thing; letting someone take those memories and place them in their mind was a dangerous and unstable prospect. It was the difference between detached observation and direct experience. A man--a lover? A torturer?--could experience the sensations he gave to another (and vice versa) until they were tangled like creeping vines, taking a stranglehold on the mind. Addiction, or even true incurable insanity could result, if one wasn't careful. 

Of course Snape was careful. He didn't put anything the boy hadn't already seen in the course of their training. And it wasn't as if he was worried about the insanity. It took several years to manifest. 

Snape knew he would not survive the coming war. He'd known it the instant the Mark on his arm began to darken. He had... resigned (accustomed?) himself to it. The question was, _how_ was he to die? 

Suicide was unthinkable. Severus Snape would die in battle, with a modicum of pride and dignity, or begging and writhing on the end of the Cruciatus. And if it had to be the latter, he was going to bring as many of the bastards down with him as possible. 

A quiet death, or an old man's death, or even a lunatic's death, these would not come to Snape, so what did it matter? 

The boy showed no reaction when he placed the memories back in his mind, but the next session Snape found his memory returned, accompanied by a similar exploration. 

Snape watched--more than that, he _felt_ as the boy's fingers skated across his chest, and breathed in the very scent of the boy, all sweat and sweetness and butterbeer. 

It was exquisite to the point of pain. 

The next memory Snape set in the Pensieve was preemptive strike--a Death Eater attack from his youth, himself masked, casting Cruciatus on a hapless Muggle family whose only crime was having a wizard son--a strike to scare the boy off. 

Or, perhaps, to see what he would take. 

A sublime fifteen minutes alone in the Gryffindor boys' shower was the answer. Utter madness. 

Next time, after the lesson, the boy remained and looked expectantly at Snape. 

"No, I want to stay. I want to see you do it," he said. "_Sir_." 

Snape glared. He disliked the open acknowledgement, but-- but he wanted to see what had been offered this week. Silently, he took a misty swirl from the Pensieve and brought it to his temple. The boy's eyes were impassive, watching like he half-watched during a Potions lecture. 

The first memory was of Quidditch--wind beaten face, whipping around lightening-quick, stretching out to catch the Snitch and hearing the cheers from the stands, heart fairly bursting with excitement and youthful delight. 

Then... 

Black. Asking if the boy--_Harry_--wanted to live with him. Receiving letters from Black while cooped up in that awful Muggle house. Christmas presents from Black. Snape felt the same joy and love as Harry. It tasted like rust on his tongue. 

The last shining wisp sat in the Pensieve. Snape knew without asking what it was. "Enough," he said. 

"No. There's one more," Harry said. 

The veil, moving gently, as if there was a breeze. Lupin's hands, holding his struggling body back. An empty hole opening up in the center of his chest. 

Snape recoiled and immediately drew the foreign memories out, flinging them into the Pensieve. "How?" How did he know just where to prod and pick? The cunning was almost worthy of Slytherin. 

"Hermione did some research into Pensieve use," Harry said conversationally. 

"And so you decided to play me for a fool? You are the very mirror of your father." 

"Not a fool. I just-- I thought--" 

"Leave," Snape said, cutting him off. 

"But--" 

"Leave. Now." 

Harry--no, the Potter boy--stopped at the doorway. "It _was_ all real," he said. 

"Get out. And if you speak of this, I'll show you what's real." 

Real. Icy tendrils of panic began to bloom in Snape's chest. What if he didn't die? What if he survived the war? Merlin, what if he lived? 

He shivered, shaking off the encroaching thoughts. If he kept thinking like that, he was going to drive himself mad. 


End file.
